


Love in the Time of Covid-19

by DonnesCafe



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Friendship, Love, M/M, Mystery, Pandemic - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-25
Updated: 2020-03-27
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:55:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23314984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DonnesCafe/pseuds/DonnesCafe
Summary: John is back in Baker Street to work at Bart's during the pandemic. Sherlock and Mrs. Hudson are on lock-down. This deals with both love and death during a pandemic which may be sensitive topics for many at the moment - please skip this one if you consider such topics inappropriate at this time.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Comments: 13
Kudos: 33





	1. Chapter 1

“Stay inside, damn you. You’re not as young as you used to be. Don’t let Mrs. Hudson come up here, even if she has biscuits. Not even the lemon ones. You could have been exposed while you were flitting about London on that last case. It hasn’t been fourteen days yet. There is plenty of food in the fridge. Which you should eat some of, by the way. There are Jaffa cakes in the cabinet. Plenty of tea, which you should drink. Stay hydrated.” 

“Boring.” Sherlock didn’t look up from the microscope where he was doing God knows what. 

“I mean it. You’ve been in a high risk category ever since Mary….” 

John didn’t finish the sentence. Silence fell. Sherlock didn’t look up from the microscope. They still didn’t talk about Mary almost killing Sherlock. They didn’t talk about Mary. They didn’t talk about much. 

Rosie was living with a relentlessly sober Harry and her partner Ginny in the relative safety of Hampshire. She was happy in the country, and all the schools were closed anyway. That was sorted. John had taken up Sherlock’s invitation to move back into Baker Street while he worked the A&E at Bart’s for the duration of the pandemic. He had closed his rural practice for the time being. He told himself he was needed in London. Sherlock told him he was needed in London. 

It was true, of course. London was the epicenter of the pandemic. He was a doctor with emergency experience. All hands on deck. It was his duty. True. It was also true that he wanted to be back in London. Back in Baker Street. It took him a lot of time to admit he missed Sherlock. If not for Covid-19, he might still be denying it. The truth was, he missed London, missed the excitement, missed Mrs. Hudson, missed Molly and Lestrade. Most of all, he had missed Sherlock. 

He wondered if Sherlock had more on his mind than the pandemic. He wondered if he did. He wondered about a lot of things now. 

So he came back to Baker Street, refused to kiss Mrs. Hudson (social distancing), and plunged into long shifts at Bart’s. For the last week he had fallen into the upstairs bed to sleep, too exhausted to even dream. He and Sherlock barely saw each other except for occasional cups of tea and take-away at a careful distance from each other. True to form, Sherlock refused to shelter-in-place for as long as possible. The only thing that persuaded him was John’s blunt warning that not only was he putting Mrs. Hudson at risk if he went out but if he brought the virus back to the flat, John's usefulness as a doctor would be over for weeks. 

As for Mrs. Hudson, John gave her strict instructions to stay inside. He refused her offers of cooking, baking, laundry. No contact unless she started showing symptoms, then he would do whatever necessary to see she was taken care of. They had a plan as a household. Everyone just had to stick to the god-damned plan. The plan included near-obsessive distancing and hand-washing on John's part. He was torn between wanting to be in Baker Street and the fear that he would bring the virus into the flat from the hospital. Sherlock was vulnerable. Ever since.... Well. John had been troubled to note that Sherlock did, indeed, look older. Thinner. Paler. Sherlock's health was compromised, and he would always feel responsible for that. 

Sherlock was now compliant. He even did the rigorous cleaning of the flat that John insisted on and which Mrs. Hudson now could not do. In addition to being compliant, Sherlock was increasingly surly, bored, and generally monosyllabic. John prayed that he wouldn’t figure out a way to order heroin delivered. John partnered with Molly to have him sent puzzles from the morgue and research questions related to epidemiology and the pandemic. To his credit, Sherlock was actually trying to do some research. He was a graduate chemist, after all, and Molly posed several questions about alternative treatments for his consideration. 

“You’re not as young as you used to be, either,” Sherlock said, still not looking up. 

“Too true. But I’m needed.” John didn’t analyze how good it felt to be able to say that. 

“John…” Sherlock finally looked up. “Be careful.” 

“I’m not an idiot.” 

“You are an idiot. It’s well established. Stay hydrated.” 

“Wanker.” 

Sherlock smiled slightly. John smiled back. He turned and strode across the lounge. The door slammed. 

Sherlock’s smile faded. His shoulders slumped. 

“Your loss would break my heart,” he said to the empty room.


	2. Chapter 2

Molly closed the heavy morgue door behind her and leaned against it for a moment. She felt the chill of the steel through her thin blouse and white coat. The bland hospital dinner of pasta and wilted salad had done little to lift her spirits. The dining room was more than half empty. Doctors, cleaning crew, nurses, security sat spaced carefully apart, too tired to talk across the gaps. 

The bright spot was that Costa had brought in decent coffee, big vats of it, free of charge for the staff, along with pastries. She had snagged a large coffee and a blueberry muffin to bring back with her. She took a sip of her coffee. Hot and strong, thank god. She was exhausted. She was used to death, but this felt different somehow. Fewer accidents, of course, since people were mostly heeding the calls to stay inside. Fewer surgical procedure deaths. Fewer heart attacks as a percentage. More and more pneumonias from the virus. Too many who had died without family near them. She was used to death, but this broke her heart. 

She had also seeing more drug deaths on her tables in the last few days. She thought of Sherlock alone in his flat. Too many drug deaths from lonely people who were looking for ways to cope. She would check on Sherlock after one more autopsy. She tried to FaceTime with him once a day, ostensibly to check up on his research but mostly just to check up on him generally. 

She donned protective gear in the little makeshift anteroom and parted the plastic curtains screening off the bodies. Immediately she knew something wasn’t right, but it took her two heartbeats to realize what it was. The problem was this. She left five bodies in the morgue when she went to dinner. Now there were seven gurneys, each with a sheet-covered body on top. 

Molly walked over to her desk at the far side of the room and took one more sip of her coffee. She put it down, along with the muffin, sat down, and went over all the paperwork on the desk. Five files: Mrs. Gupta (85, presumed Covid with underlying diabetes), John Doe (found already dead in an alley off Gower Street, no ID, age and cause of death unknown), Mr. Allen (38 years old, pneumonia, no known underlying conditions), Ms. Adebayo (72, pneumonia, history of asthma), and Mr. Deitrich (21, tox screen lit up like a Christmas tree as well as pneumonia). 

She looked back over the expanse of the morgue. Seven. Nothing in her in-box, not so much as a sheet of paper, much less the files required for two additional autopsies. She went through everything in her outbox and found only the files from yesterday. Those bodies had been released and removed yesterday. She looked in every drawer in her desk. Nothing. Now she was angry. She knew people were worn down and rushed off their feet, but there was a procedure. There had to be paperwork, otherwise you risked confusion and delay. 

Ordinarily there was always someone in the morgue, but her assistant had come down with the virus last week and was self-isolating at home. There was no one else to spare. There were no locks on the swinging doors to the morgue. 

Molly sighed, took another sip of coffee, and stood up. Maybe whoever brought them had left the paperwork on the bodies themselves. She removed the sheets from each body, one by one, and returned the sheets to the five she recognized. She was left with two strangers.


End file.
